The Scientist's Murders
by ThisDivaLovesMattHardy
Summary: Nick, Sara, and Warrick find the bodies of a famous (fictional) forensic scientist's family. They have to figure out what happened. ((OoC: This is a sci-fi story I had to write for my english class... I got 100.5 out of 108 points, and I want to know what


The Scientist's Murders

Picture it: a quiet little house, a quiet little neighborhood. No one would have ever seen the likeness of what was about to happen coming. No one would've even known what happened if a nanny, Chesney Fox, hadn't gone to work at the Smith house on Blue Diamond Road in Las Vegas, Nevada.

"911, what is your emergency?"

"Yeah, uh, I was just at my place of employment, the Smith residence, house number 5445, on Blue Diamond Road. Mrs. Smith and her two children have been murdered!" Chesney said, out of breath and near hysteria.

"And you are..?"

"I'm their nanny, Chesney Fox. I was to see the children off to school and then watch the house while the Smiths are at work."

"Thank you for calling, Ms. Fox. We'll send a crime unit out there shortly. Good bye."

"Bye."

Several minutes later a black Chevy Tahoe pulled up to the Smith family home, and out stepped Nick Stokes, Sara Sidle, and Warrick Brown.

"7:00 A.M. callout. Looks like another double," Warrick sighed as they walked toward the house.

From outside there appeared to be nothing suspicious, nothing criminal. That was soon contrasted, however, by the inside of the house.

"Oh my God, this perp was psycho!" Nick exclaimed.

"Yeah, you said it Nick. Who could do this?" Sara wondered aloud.

"And _how_? That's what always gets me," Warrick commented.

What these three crime scene investigators were commenting on was the scene displayed in the dining room of the Smith home. There, sitting at the dining room table, was a woman and two children. It looked as if they had just dropped dead in the middle of their dinner, as they were all face down in the cold food on their plates. All three victims had been dressed in their best clothes and their skin was pasty white and cold. The investigators had each been maneuvering their way around the room to get a different look at the corpses when Nick broke the silence.

"What happened to Dad?" he asked.

"What do you mean?" Warrick replied, glancing at Sara.

After snapping a picture of it with his digital camera, Nick lifted a family photo off of the wall and walked over to stand by the others.

"See, a family of four. Our dead mother, two sons… and a father. What happened to Dad?"

"Hmmm," Warrick said, thinking, and then continued, "I don't know. Guess we'll have to figure that out!" he added with just a hint of sarcasm.

"Oh my gosh! I know who that guy is! That's David Smith, the forensic scientist!" Sara exclaimed.

"And how do you know this?" Nick and Warrick inquired.

"Oh, it was uh… it was in a forensics journal. Grissom got it for me last Christmas. I'm going to… to go get my kit so we can start processing," and she walked right out the door without another word to the two of them.

"Hey, 'Rick, did you ever get a present from Grissom?" Nick asked his colleague.

"No," Warrick laughed.

A few minutes later Sara, Warrick and Nick came walking back into the house carrying their crime scene kits. Warrick decided to take the bodies, Sara would take the rest of the room, and Nick would take the floor. While examining a large set of cabinets, Sara found a small snag of blue fabric, caked with some sort of unknown, sweet-smelling liquid. She snapped a photo of it, and then picked it up with her tweezers. She sprayed it with Luminol.. nothing.

"Hmm.. I wonder what this is from…" Sara questioned as she bagged the cloth fragment and set it next to her kit. She found another foreign substance on the glass of one of the doors of the cabinets. Sara swabbed it and set the swab next to the cloth fragment.

Nick was searching through every square inch of the carpet. He came upon some small, round spheres of metal. He took a photograph of them and picked one up.

"Hey, 'Rick, what do you make of this? Mercury, maybe?" Nick inquired.

"Yeah, could be," Warrick replied.

Nick continued to search the floor. He stumbled upon a short brown hair, with the epithelial cells still attached to the roots. "Greg will be able to analyze this," Nick muttered to himself as he bagged the hair. He searched the rest of the floor, finding nothing.

Warrick couldn't start his work until he had the coroner's okay. When David, the assistant coroner, had removed the bodies, it was Warrick's turn to get to work. Before David left, he took a DNA sample from all three victims for the CSIs to use for comparison. Warrick dusted the chairs around the table for fingerprints, finding and lifting a set of partial handprints from each one. Warrick then proceeded to put the victims' meals into evidence containers for later analysis. Everything was quiet during this time, until Sara spoke up.

"Nick, toss me the bottle of phenolphthalein and some cotton swabs, will you?" she asked, reaching behind the cabinets.

"What for?" Nick asked, not looking up from the crime scene sketch he was making.

"Because I'd like to know if this is blood," Sara replied, holding up a long, slender, brass candlestick and pointing to the round, flat end where a brownish substance had dried.

Nick tossed what she had requested to her in a spare evidence bag. Sara wet the cotton tip, swabbed the substance, and then dropped a drop of phenolphthalein onto it. It turned red.

"Someone's got a severe gash on his or her person," Sara stated as she collected a fresh sample of the dried blood.

While all this was going on, Warrick had dusted the table for fingerprints, but found nothing usable. Then he sprayed Luminol on the table, finding a bloody handprint and droplets of blood.

"There was definitely a struggle," Warrick said as he collected a sample of the blood he'd found.

"If there's blood on the table, then there's bound to be blood on the carpet," Nick said, "I'll go get the Alternate Light Source," and he walked out.

Nick returned a minute later carrying a box with what looked like a snake coming out of it.

"Want to hit the lights, Warrick?"

When the lights clicked off, Nick turned on the ALS, which had a purple color to it. "Get a picture of this blood, Warrick," Nick said as the ALS revealed a large stain of blood that had been cleaned previously. Then he sprayed Luminol on the stain and swabbed it to see if they could get any usable DNA out of it.

"So," Sara chimed in. "we've got a struggle, someone bleeds, and then three people wind up dead. We need to get back to the lab to analyze all this evidence," she said.

"Yeah, let's go" Warrick said, and they left the house, sealing the door with three strips of red evidence tape.

Soon after, the three CSIs were walking into the Las Vegas Crime Lab.

"I'll go into an analysis room and start separating the meals we found," Warrick said.

"Yeah, I'll go with you," Sara added.

"Guess I'm taking these swabs to Greg, then going to the morgue," Nick replied, bewildered.

When he walked into the Trace/DNA lab, the lab tech, Greg Sanders, had his nose buried down a microscope and was humming a tune to himself. Nick was standing there for a good minute or two before tapping Greg on the shoulder, causing him to nearly jump right out of his skin.

"Stokes! That's not funny! What's the deal!" Greg exclaimed, trying desperately to catch his breath.

"I have this stuff I need you to analyze," Nick said, setting down the swab of the liquid Sara had found, the cloth fragment, the small metal spheres, the hair, and the swabs of the three blood spots they'd found.

"Alright, that all?" Greg inquired.

"Yeah, but here's the DNA of all three victims," Nick replied as he set down the last three swabs.

"I'll page you when I'm done," Greg said.

"Alright," Nick nodded and walked out.

On his way to the morgue, Nick dropped off the four prints they'd found at the print lab. When he walked into the examination room at the morgue, he found Dr. Robbins pouring over the dead mother.

"Hello, Nick," the old doctor said when he came in.

"Hey, doc. Did you just start our victims?"

"No, I've actually just finished," Dr. Robbins replied matter-of-factly. "Fatal doses of halothane and scopolamine were the downfall of these three, and they've all been dead twelve to fourteen hours."

"So that puts time of death last night, around five o'clock?" Nick asked.

"Yes. Maybe your killed laced the victims' dinners with those chemicals?" Doctor Robbins suggested.

"Well, we found bloody handprints, and all kinds of signs of struggle," Nick wondered, looking confused.

"Maybe there was another way of killing them, before the food? Oh, that reminds me. The mom had skin and dried blood under her nails. I scraped it out," Doctor Robbins informed Nick as he handed him a small, clear evidence bag with what looked like bloody toenails in it.

"Other than this, did you find any open wounds or anything?" Nick inquired.

"No. Other than having halothane and scopolamine in their systems, these were three healthy people… until they died," Doctor Robbins concluded.

"Alright, thanks Doc," Nick said and walked out.

Nick was on his way to the Trace/DNA lab when he heard someone call his name. It was Mia, from fingerprint analysis.

"What's up, Mia?" Nick asked.

"I just finished analyzing those prints you brought me. All three belonged to David Smith, the forensic scientist. Plus, I just received a fax from Doctor Robbins. He found a print on the mother's body after further examination. I ran it through AFIS, the Automated Fingerprint Identification System. Match to Smith."

"Alright, Mia, thanks," Nick replied and walked out and into the Trace/DNA lab down the hall.

"Sanders - Got anything for me, yet?"

"Yep, Nicky. The blood - all of it - was David Smith's. The liquid swab was halothane; the cloth fragment was some sort of cotton and silk mix, caked in scopolamine. The hair came from the same donor as the blood, David Smith. But what was mercury doing on the floor?"

"And what was it doing in the victims' dinners?" Warrick said as he and Sara came in.

"Greg, we need to know whether or not there are fatal amounts of halothane or scopolamine in here," Sara requested as she set the evidence jars of food in front of Greg.

"Oh, yeah, and I need to know if this DNA is David Smith's," Nick said, adding to the pile.

"Guys!" Greg exclaimed, "I'm going to need time, so take a break. I'll page you when I'm nearly done."

The three CSIs left the lab, and went to sit in the break room.

"Well, looks like all signs point to Smith," Warrick said, munching on an apple.

"Yeah," Nick replied, "the blood and prints you found are his, 'Rick, and there was _a ton_ of halothane and scopolamine in that room."

"So, what happened?" Sara asked. "They're eating dinner. Mom realized that David's laced their food by the taste and smell. She grabs the candlestick, hits him. He falls to the floor, and gets blood all over. David pulls himself back up, getting bloody prints all over the table and grabbing Mom's arm…"

"By now," Nick continued, "Mom and the kids are getting groggy and passing out. David knows their dead or close to it, so he arranges the bodies in the chairs, leaving the handprints you found, Warrick. He's in the process of cleaning when he sees there's a hole where he was hit with the candlestick. He finds the fragment, soaks it in something…"

"That 'something' is scopolamine. I found halothane - trace amounts - and mercury in the food. The cells you gave me, Nick - we have, yet again, the man of the hour David Smith," said Greg, as he stood in the doorway.

"Thanks, Greg," Sara said.

"Yep, not a problem," Greg nodded, and walked out. Soon after, Jim Brass of homicide came walking in.

"We've got David Smith in Interrogation, if you want to talk to him," Brass told the CSIs.

"How'd you know?" Sara asked.

"Those lab techs figure everything out for you guys," Brass replied. Sara, Warrick, and Nick looked at each other quickly, and then followed Brass to the interrogation room.

"So," Warrick said, looking at Smith, "Want to tell us why you murdered your wife and kids?"

"I didn't," David Smith persisted.

"Bull!" Nick said furiously. "We found your bloody handprints, your prints on the dining room chairs, and a print of _your_ tight grip on your dead wife's arm!"

"What could you have _possibly _had to gain?" Sara asked.

"M-m-money. Insurance money. I had new experiments coming up, and I couldn't finance them. I figured if I planted the mercury, and used all those fatal inhalants you'd be confused, and the blood made and even better cover-up," David confessed.

"Yeah? Well if you couldn't fool us then you're not a very good forensic scientist, are you?" Warrick said.

"You don't understand. I tried to tell my wife that if she went back to work and put the boys into daycare, I could finance my next experiment that would make the whole family better from a financial aspect. The experiment was to invent what is called a poisodetector, which can detect fatal inhalants like halothane and scopolamine. It would help crime labs everywhere. Just run it through the air, over an area, and beeps will alert you as to the level of the fatal inhalant. But my wife wouldn't leave her life of luxury. Heaven forbid she should have to do anything for herself," Smith finished.

"Well you're not going to be able to help anyone anymore," Sara said, "except maybe the inmates at Nevada State Prison."

"See you in court," Warrick said. He, Nick, and Sara walked out without another word to or look at David Smith. They knew they had a strong enough case to put him away for the murder of his wife and two children. The one thought that was running through the heads of the three CSIs, however, was the one question they could never completely answer: Why had David Smith killed his family?


End file.
